Dangerous Liaisons? State-Chaebol Co-operation and the Global Privatisation of Development

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the relationships between private and public sectors in shaping the South Korean development assistance agenda. Since 2008, subsequent Korean administrations have made development assistance a keystone of their foreign policy. Fast growing middle-income countries seem to be favourite development partners for these administrations and the parallel increase in the overseas expansion of Korean chaebol in these developing partner markets suggests that interactions between private economic interests and development assistance exigencies have been numerous. Based upon fieldwork on Korean development assistance, this article shows that Korean conglomerates are both informally and structurally included in decision-making processes as a result of the specific governance architecture inherited from the developmental state era. But recently, since its accession to the Development Assistance Committee in 2010, Korea has also been institutionalising private actors’ inclusion in official development assistance delivery mechanisms. This should be understood as part of a global agenda that has increasingly privatised development formulation and delivery. The inclusion of chaebol in official development assistance through institutional mechanisms might actually be more aligned with Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development norms than the existing literature suggests.

KEY WORDS:

• official development assistance
• South Korea
• chaebol
• privatisation
• developmentalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the journal’s anonymous reviewers, Justin Robertson, Christoph Neusiedl, Toby Carroll, Darryl Jarvis, Bernice Maxton-Lee, Yvette To, Miriam Sanchez and Valerio Mazzone for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article, ODA will refer to the international development practices of the Korean government. It should be noted that Korea did not provide ODA until 2010, although it had already engaged in a series of development co-operation practices.

2. Defined as companies employing from 250 to 2000 employees, with an annual turnover comprising between US$35 million and US$400 billion. These are large Korean firms but they are not chaebol.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this article was supported by the Asian Development Institute, Seoul National University through a Visiting Fellowship; the Chow Yei Ching School of Graduate Studies, City University of Hong Kong through its Research Activities Fund; and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council through the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme Research Related Travel Allowance.